Statement of Belief

John R Gavazzoni

May 11, 2002

Thousand Oaks, CA

I believe in the one, true God, eternal in Being, whose essence is love; the I Am, who is internally relational and who, in and by Their Pure Relational Being, becomes the Family of God, the God-Family. This procession from Being to Family is by the impregnation and conception within the I Am who knows His Spouse as integral to His own Being, the Complement of His Person and in that pure coitus of perfect love, the Son is eternally begotten.

The Son of His love is the exact representation of the Divine Nature and in Him dwells all the fulness of Deity. God, the Primal "Us,"
self-described plurally as the curtain of biblical revelation opens; the One who becomes Father and Mother by conjugal love, by Divine pursuit and surrender, by Divine assertion and reception, by the combining of the DNA of Deity, the gender complete Deity, becomes and is Family by the communion of the Holy Spirit, who is the life of Deity and is He who constitutes the flow of Being and Personified transmission of love within and among the God-Family.

The Sperm of God, which is His Word, the Christ, sent forth by and in the ecstasy of divine love, seeks and penetrates the yielded Ovum of God in the climax of God's own Self Knowledge eternally generating the Son of God, who Being the perfect Image of His Parental Source, the Radiance of the Parental glory, like His Father, seeks union with His internal bride, and thereby is the family of God infinitely multiplied out from the One Seed, the Christ, the Single-begotten Son.

I affirm that the Son is singularly and uniquely, the Christ of God, yet by Him, many sons are begotten all proceeding processionally out from the One Seed, the result being many sons consituted by One sonship. Family-constituted, Family-defined Personhood, eternally proceeds forth from our Primal Origin, Love. From the Single-Begotten proceeds many sons, many brethren, one New Humanity, One Body. The Christ in the Head of the Body, but in union with the Head, the Body, with Him, is also the Christ of God.

This corporate Christ includes a Bride, and together They are the perfect and complete image of Father-Mother God. Those that are begotten by the union of the Son with His Bride are also truly sons of God having their origin in the Primal Seed. Such progression is not to be understood "under the sun," but as the eternal unfolding of God, our Family.

I believe in God as both Progenitor of all Being and the Creator of all things, initiating all His/Her offspring by His Seed, the Word, the Christ, and releasing forth and forming all creation from His Substance. In creation, Deity becomes existential in the eons, immanently in all creation, but particularly in man. In this Way, beyond carnal understanding, God, in the eons, becomes what He is not, while never ceasing to be all that He is eternally, and in overcoming what He is not, by what He is, He draws forth out of His depths otherwise hidden dimensions of His glory.

From this ultimate quandary there develops the tension, ambiguity and finally, perversity of existence. Thereby the Essence of Being, which is Love, becomes to creation what creation cannot be to itself. This is grace. And in His Son, He returns all things in His Son to the glory which He, the Son, had before the world began. The grain of wheat has fallen into the ground and died, and will not abide alone. Full Family glory requires the Family crisis of all Fulness being subjected to deprivation, the deprivation of death by sin, and all that death includes.

By this contrarianism, and the conquering of the same, the Family of God realizes its greatest potential so that principalities and powers, by beholding such wonders, are taught the manifold wisdom of God. This wisdom is necessary for the administration of the kingdom of God that begins at the highest level of sons down to the lowest level of angels. At the heart of this divine wisdom is the ordering of death and resurrection, life out of death, which eternal reality was historically demonstrated by Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and Son of Man, our Savior, in His earthly passion.

THAT WHICH IS BEING, must be subjected to that which CLAIMS independence of being, and that which claims independence seeks the death of Him upon whom they are dependent. It is in this struggle that divine love is seen at its best as it yields to the attack of the those who owe all to Him, and yet who wish to break "free" from Him and be gods in their own right. This rebellion is conceived not by any initiation of the creature's will, but by the will of the Creator who deprives the creature of light and thereby creates the unimaginable in the creatures imagination.

The creature must experience how alienated and hostile it will act toward God and itself when left to itself. This alienated "self" is the false persona, the alter ego that we must all bear so that by becoming what we are not, we shall fully come to know who we are. When the independent "self" is left to itself, it resentfully affirms its independence through rebellion, waiting to see how its Father-Creator will react. Deep within the heart of the rebel is the cry, "will you love me even in my rebellion.

It seeks the crisis. It seeks to know, once and for all if it is unreservedly loved. Hence Golgotha, hence Calvary, hence the passion of man meets the passion of God and we know, we see, we understand that we are loved. It is as love that God must be known. This is the administration of His Family-kingdom. And love can only be fully known in its response to attack. Love can only be fully known when It refuses to act in retaliatory vengeance, but instead submits to the infamous hostility of crucifixion with unflinching grace.

I believe that man is the image and glory of God for he is only to be known, in truth, as in the Christ, who is the Primal image and glory of God. The Christ does not grasp nor keep the glory for Himself alone, but as the Seed become the Son, He gives His glory, the glory of the Father to all His brethren. The glory is hidden within their creaturehood, yet it is in their creaturehood that the glory shall finally be fully expressed.

I believe that a transcendent, normative, divinely inspired record of the above administration has been given us in Holy Scripture by which we are turned to Christ, the living Word of God, who declares His Father and our Father to us. When exposed to its pages a providentially ordered interplay of penultimate revelation and yes, with it, an ugly distortion of the face of God occurs, for Holy Writ serves, on one hand, to lead us to the ultimate revelation, Christ Himself, but to that end it paradoxically hides God from us and demonstrates that, left to ourselves, we will read into it all the perversity of our fallen imagination.

Without it we are deceived, yet by its letter we also deceived, in preparation of the true Light that lighteth every man, coming into the world. The Bible is given to us, full of the shadows of Truth, to demonstrate the vanity of our knowledge of Him.

What is the final conclusion? The Book of books, like all things and with all things, works together, or is worked together by God for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose. Without it, we are helpless. With it we are helpless, but through it help comes and we abuse the help until the help overcomes our abuse. It is one of many good and holy things which must finally decrease that He might increase.

I believe in Christ as the Head of His church, a church not constituted by creeds, dogma and hierarchy, but the church, the organic fellowship of members joined in One body, edifying itself in love and knowing its Head in the measure that it knows the love that flows from that headship. I do not believe in the faith as a body of doctrine, but I know it as the gift of the faith of the Son of God to His church, the only faith without mixture which is the Son's response to the Father's faithfulness.

I believe in the communion of the saints which is not a mutual admiration society composed of similar thinking individuals who congratulate one another that they are right in their understanding of God, but rather is a grant by grace of communion in and with Deity through the glorified humanity of our Lord.

I believe in the forgiveness of sins, firstly as it is grounded in the immutable disposition of God toward sinners whereby He refuses to disqualify any man or woman from the purpose of His love for them, while He corrects that in them which is not worthy of their sonship and His kingdom.

I believe in the forgiveness of sins secondarily as the communication of the Divine disposition to the human heart whereby the pressure of forgiveness as it flows from the heart of God to our hearts causes the opening of our hearts so that what is subjectively in the heart of God becomes subjective in us.

So great is the love. which by nature will not reckon sin against us that the human heart cannot finally resist and turns to God in grateful reception of that which is held in the heart of God for us.

I believe in eternal life, which is God Himself, who becomes eonion life in Christ, abiding in the eon(s) till all death is swallowed up by the victory of His resurrection.

I believe that in the death and resurrection of Christ, Father God acted, and in that action historically carried out in time that which is eternally sealed in His heart. He acted, reconciling all men by His death and saving all men by His life from the dead.

He continues to act to make men aware of the love which constitutes the Christ event and as He was successful in the first, he shall be successful in the second. This we know as the good news of the glory of Christ. As His son, I know and believe the love God has for us. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the personal Spirit of the communion of the Family of God. I believe in the resurrection of the body, the mortal body; for that which is immortal needs no resurrection. Our very body, which the apostle calls into the service of God with its instrumental members of righteousness, presently carries the burden of alien mortality.

Existentially it is mortal, but as the expression of Being it shall come forth out of its affliction of death to bring the glory of God to final consummation. There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body.

Paradoxically it, singular, is sown in dishonor and raised in glory, for there is One Body.